I’ve just read a great post over at the Hacking Windows 7 Media Center blog about how to add new start menu strips. It tells you how you can move Add-Ins out of the hidden depths that Microsoft has relegated them in Windows 7. I was chuffed to bits to see that the example that Michael uses is none other than TunerFreeMCE. Thanks Michael!
Posts Tagged ‘Media Center’
Creating New Start Menu Strips
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009Flash in windows media center
Friday, February 13th, 2009Since my TunerFreeMCE code has been out there for almost a year now, I have picked up a fair bit of experience of playing flash on windows media center.
Most of the TV companies who provide flash video do so using the Akamai tech stack to secure and stream their content. They build their own custom flash players on top of that to provide their own flavour to the players, e.g. related videos and so on. The probably intentional side effect of this is that it is really not trivial to get in to their flash streams and do anything with it. It’s not like the have an rtmp url easily accessible for you to get hold of. There are ways of doing it, but not easily. There is for example a project on sourceforge called rtmpdump (http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtmpdump/) which allows you to download flash videos from the BBC and from Hulu. (more…)
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
At last, just 6 days after the issue first happened, The Green Button is operational again! I’ll be responding to all of my backed up queries there shortly.
?photo?credit:?Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton
The Green Button workaround
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009If, like me, you have been having issues with The Green Button‘s forums, you will probably be disapointed to see it isn’t fixed yet. There is however a workaround. Use Internet Explorer to log in to the site, and click on “Quick Reply” 
This opens a pretty nice editor to allow you to successfully post messages. Yes, I do think it’s coincidence that the only way to use this Microsoft site is with Internet Explorer.
Adding a version checker – code walkthrough
Monday, February 2nd, 2009I was reading an article today on Symbian Guru about how more and more S60 developers are doing the right thing by including an automatic check for updates to their code. It guilted me in to realizing that it’s one of the big features that was missing from my TunerFreeMCE application. It also made me realize that I didn’t know what the best practice was for things like that, so I googled “c# check for new program version” and frankly what came back was irrelevant or overly complex. I had some very simple requirements;
- Minimal web traffic – I pay for this hosting you know!
- Minimal application impact
- Easy for the user
The Green Button still having issues
Monday, February 2nd, 2009A bunch of folks have sent me messages at TheGreenButton recently, and unfortunatly I didn’t get any notifications, so sorry about not responding folks. To make matters worse, I logged in at the weekend and spotted the posts, and was unable to send any replies. Any time you try to make a post, you get the following error;
The Green Button Dies